– my hurt is real and true AND I don’t want to project this hurt onto others

– I have a tendency to use controlling behaviours to hurt others, using my history as a justification, which is abusive

– my desire for punitive measures against others is understandable based on the hurt AND does not work towards the kinds of community I desire

– somewhere in my body I believe that people can grow and change and while it might not be my role to support this in people who have perpetrated against me, i don’t want to prevent them from having these supports and connections

-while it scares me, I value when people call me out/in for my abusive and controlling behaviours, many which emerge from my experiences of violence, as it helps me work towards healing and reclaiming my actions from trauma.

In all this I want to recognize that survivorship is a really complex and diverse experience. These are important rememberances for me and won’t apply to everyone who is navigating trauma and survivorship

My needs and wants are real and legitimate.
And I am responsible for the ways I meet them.
The legitimacy of my needs does not negate the necessity to engage with the harm that may come about from meeting them.
I can continue to learn better ways to meet my needs that not only cause less harm to others and myself but simultaneously increase others’ abilities to meet their own needs.
I can find transformative ways of meeting these needs that expand the very limits of what I think is possible for myself and the people and spaces I relate to.

an edit of a previous thing I wrote. Can’t seem to write new things, and enjoying going over old stuff.

– – –

My heart is hurting. With a perpetual longing for connection, for healing, for safety. Safety in ourselves, in others, in community. Hurting heart.

My heart is bitter. It has become judgmental, mean, protected. From all the times I thought I would get what I needed: connection, care, community. Bitter heart.

My heart is tired. Tired of thinking there are places for us. Places for broken, messed up hearts. Places to rest. Places of refuge. Tired heart.

We can sense other hearts. Hurting hearts, bitter hearts, tired hearts. But like us, they are guarded by sharp-beaked, short-fused egos. By brains of great dominance; survivor super organs. They get us through, keep us moving.

I have become a fine connoisseur of over-developed ego. I am the president of the Protective Brains for Feeling Eradication Society. And I am hurting. I am heartbroken. Broken hearts let egos run rampant.

I needed to take a break from writing. I have been really enjoying learning to write about my trauma, my grief and pain and I am starting to understand it as another important tool for healing, coping, sharing and connecting with others. And it’s fucking hard.

I took to last week to care for myself in the other ways I have learnt over the last few years. Taking myself for walks, spending time with people who see all of me, solitude, physical activity, treats like Sour Soup and hi-chews.

Today is the first time I have sat down to write in almost a week. The prompt that caught my attention was “What condition is my heart in?” Here is some of what came out.

– – –

My heart is hurting. It throbs with a perpetual longing for connection, for healing, for safety. Safety in ourselves, in others, in community. Hurting heart.

My heart is bitter. In protecting itself, it has become judgmental, mean. From all the times I thought I would get what I needed, that I was going to have connection, care, community. Bitter heart.

We are tired of thinking there are places for us. Places for broken hearts. Places for hurting hearts. Places for bitter hearts. We can sense we aren’t the only bleeding heart in this room, in this community. But like us, those hearts are guarded by sharp-beaked, short-fused egos. By frontal lobes, brains of great dominance, our survivor super organ. It gets us through, protecting our hearts, keeping us moving. We’re mean. We’re insecure. We’re defensive. We’re protective. We’re malice. We’re insecure. We’re heartbroken.

My heart is an exile. Rejected by community, by relationship, by self. We don’t survive when we hurt. We don’t survive when we feel. Just need to think, to plan, to get in control. My heart lives under the reign of the fascist powers of logic and reason; subject to the judgement, the violence of my brain, my ego’s internalizations of your expectations.

Think. Act. Do.
Reason. Logic. Explain.
No feel. No affect. No flow.
Surviving is “one step at a time”
One calculated, logical step at a time
In the Right direction
Progress.
Move forward.
Not sideways
God forbid backwards.
Integrate.
Don’t disintegrate
ONE self.
Only one self
One brain, no heart
Tin Man ideals
Hold yourself together.
Put yourself back together
Like there was a before

Be the best cog you can be
Functioning means thinking
Means going to work
Means paying your rent
Integrate into society
Not with yourself
Segregate your pain
Eliminate your hurt
Eliminate yourself
Think. Act. Do.
Strategize.
Play the game.
Make your mother proud.

– – –

I have a stronger relationship with my heart than I used to. A direct relationship. Before, I would speak my heart with my brain, know my heart with my ego. Ego knows nothing but itself. Like a politician speaking “for the people” ego only truly speaks for itself.

Me.
I.
Survive.
No Us
just me
just I
Singular.
Logical.
In control.

My body is much better at speaking my heart. My body has always been speaking my heart, even before I understood what it was saying. In anxiety. In panic. In chronic pain. In nausea. If I pay attention, body is always speaking heart. Swollen fingers, swollen heart. Nerve pain, heart pain. Nauseous stomach, nauseous heart.

I have been working hard to learn to listen to my body, to understand the messages my exiled heart is sending through this embodied morse code. I have been learning to decipher the code. And learning to send messages back, learning this body code so that I can care for my heart even when I cannot connect with it directly. This secret code has kept my ego out of it, protected my heart from the violence I enact on it when it directly shows itself.

Panic.
Put your feet on the floor
Anxiety.
Take these bones for a walk
Nausea.
Listen to your inner voice
Nerve pain.
Soak these muscles

Panic.
Put your feet on the floor
Touch the ground, look to the sky
Dirt between your toes
Anxiety.
Take these bones for a walk
To the library
Touch every book you desire
Nausea.
Listen to your inner voice
What aren’t you saying?
Write it down, yell it out
Nerve pain.
Soak these muscles
Stretch them out
Open up the channels again

– – –

My heart knows when people are hurting. We can register another broken heart from a miraculous distance, across mountains, across oceans, across conflict, across isolation. We can perceive this hurt, this intensity with such complexity, with such reverence for the pain, the trauma, for those things ego could never speak. My heart always believes you. My heart always knows it’s true.

Sit with it
Be with it
We see you
all of you
all truth
all legitimate
all honest
Your strength
to feel
to hurt
to struggle
Your exhaustion
at surviving
getting through
If you stopped right now
you would be enough
Sublime
Absolute
True

There is an otherworldly intensity to the deep dark blue A blue that not only registers in your eyes but in your heart, in your body, in your soul. It has a weight to it, a density like no other. The deep dark blue holds you in this way you never have been held. You are sure it will crush you, demolish you, extinguish you. But as this deepest blue engulfs you, it holds you. As it swaddles you, it reminds you of your wholeness.

Being engulfed in the deep dark blue collects you in a way you have not felt since before you thought about feeling. The deep dark blue surrounds you until you become nothing and you are able to become something again.

– – –

They tell you not to dive into the deep dark blue. They tell you to fight it, to swim against it, to tread water no matter what. They tell you that to sink into the depths would mean you have lost, you have let the sadness and pain get the best of you. They never stop to think that maybe the sadness and pain are part of the best of you.

They tell you to avoid the deep dark blue, to find ways to erase it from your life. They tell you to cover over the deep dark blue. They tell you to not let it have a say in who you are and what you do. Wipe the slate clean. Let the past be the past. Start anew.Move on from the deep dark blue.

So you decide to lay planks, to construct a wall between you and its depths. You can still feel it flow beneath you. So you amass a collection of distractions: things, people, relationships, habits. Ways to ignore the ocean that rolls and creaks below your wooden blockade. You become determined to prove you don’t live on the ocean anymore; to prove you have done away with the deep dark blue.

Overtime, you begin to forget about the deep dark blue. You come to believe that its depths were a dream, maybe a childhood story someone told you. And maybe, you even begin to forget the fantasy itself. You learn to practice a denial so skillful you don’t feel the slight sway of the deep dark blue under your planks. And in time, you even erase those planks. You aren’t at sea. You aren’t afloat. You are solid. You are grounded.

But one time when you are alone, maybe laying in bed, maybe reading a book, you feel this ache. It starts somewhere in your pelvis then spreads to your chest. This pain is strangely familiar, alerting you to something missing. Your brain tries to brush it off as something from your day, something you saw on tv or heard in conversation with a friend. You brain tries it hardest to keep you forgetting.

But this ache persists. Not all the time, not in everything you do. More like an unexpected hiccup: it pops up when things seem quiet. You sporadically hiccup this pain for a while, it getting harder and harder for your brain to find excuses. You begin to ache more often, until it is almost a continuous pain. Until there is nothing you can project it onto. Until there is no practical answer to its cause.

This amplifying ache, this intensifying loss undefined, pain unexplained, begins to take over. It becomes panic. It becomes mania. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just do my regular things? Why can’t I fix this? What’s my problem? Anxieties bombard you as you remain numb to the sway of the deep dark blue beneath you.

So you set about fixing it. You set about gaining control by controlling yourself. You make an inventory of good and bad parts of you. And then you go about eradicating all the bad. And each time you complete a cull, each time you think you have purged all your evil, the pain arises again. Louder and more overwhelming. You must not have been honest enough with yourself. You must not have worked hard enough to fix it. So you intensify your self-extermination, letting less and less be good. You sever almost all of yourself from yourself. And yet the ache persists.

You are all but gone and the pain is still there. You are barely surviving all the violence you have inflicted on yourself. And, while you lay there, almost gone, almost nothing, you notice the planks. You are too tired to maintain the denial. You feel the woodgrain of the rotting planks underneath you. You begin to feel the sway of the deep dark blue.

The planks, like you exhausted from years of lies and denial, give way. You feel your battered body slip into the deep dark blue. You are sure this must be the end. Finally. You are sure this will extinguish what little light is left in you. Thank goodness. You let go.

But it’s not the end. It’s the deep dark blue.

As you sink into it you feel the banished parts of yourself return. The parts you defined as too much. The parts you extracted to try to be okay. They are not too much for the deep dark blue. They are exactly what the depths desire, what they crave. The ocean collects you, holds you, embraces you, lets you be. All of it truth. All of it you. In the deep dark blue you have become nothing and everything. You have come home.